Health News

The coronavirus mortality rate among some of the poorest Catalans is five times higher than among the wealthiest residents of the Spanish region, a study showed, in the latest evidence of how COVID-19 hits the needy hardest.

Thailand will maintain its state of emergency over the coronavirus until the end of June, its COVID-19 task force said on Friday, in an effort to keep infections under control as the government prepares to ease restrictions further.

Britain should have learned more from other countries who were tackling coronavirus outbreaks earlier, the head of NHS England Simon Stevens said on Friday, acknowledging that not everything with the response had gone perfectly.

Children have milder COVID-19 symptoms than adults and the balance of evidence suggests they may also have lower susceptibility and infectivity than adults, scientists advising the British government have said.

President Vladimir Putin told officials on Friday to ramp up testing for the new coronavirus, but said Russia's outbreak was stabilising even as the death toll rose by a record one-day amount.

The United Kingdom's death toll from confirmed cases of COVID-19 rose by 351 to 36,393 as of 1600 GMT on May 21, the health ministry said.

The United States called on the World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday to begin work immediately on investigating the source of the novel coronavirus, as well as its handling of the response to the pandemic.

African nations should use antibody tests to find out whether the slower spread and lower mortality rate of the new coronavirus on the continent is due to patchy data or a more resilient population, former British prime minister Tony Blair said on Friday.

The United States called on the World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday to begin work immediately on investigating the source of the novel coronavirus, as well as its own handling of the response to the pandemic.

The city of Wuhan, the original epicentre of the new coronavirus outbreak in China, conducted 1,000,729 nucleic acid tests on May 21, the local health authority said on Friday, compared with 887,321 tests a day earlier.

(This May 21 story clarifies that lockdown is entering ninth week, not eighth week)

The new coronavirus is believed to be spreading throughout Yemen where the health care system "has in effect collapsed", the United Nations said on Friday, appealing for urgent funding.

China's top leaders took the stage in front of a sea of masked delegates for the opening of parliament on Friday, the culmination of intensive planning at a time when gatherings around the world have been curtailed by the new coronavirus.

Here's what you need to know about the coronavirus right now:

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany increased by 460 to 177,212, data from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases showed on Friday.

South Korean contract drugs manufacturer Samsung Biologics Co Ltd said on Friday it had signed a deal worth more than $231 million with GlaxoSmithKline PLC (GSK) to supply biopharmaceutical products over the next eight years.

The United States has secured almost a third of the first 1 billion doses planned for AstraZeneca's experimental COVID-19 vaccine by pledging up to $1.2 billion, as world powers scramble for medicines to get their economies back to work.

Technology companies are developing their own contact tracing systems to help prevent coronavirus outbreaks in their offices as countries begin to ease lockdown measures and a return to the workplace is in the offing.

China recorded four new coronavirus cases on May 21, up from two a day earlier, the National Health Commission (NHC) reported on Friday.

Mexican health authorities on Thursday reported 2,973 more coronavirus cases, a daily record for new infections, bringing the country's total tally to 59,567 cases.